Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind Book Summary

There is a question that follows us throughout our existence. “Who are we and what does it mean to be human?” The mechanism that pushes human knowledge forward is fuelled by curiosity. Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari brings insights from science and the humanities together to answer the curiosity of what means to be human with his book: “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind”. As the book portrays, human history has been shaped by three major revolutions. Firstly, there was the Cognitive Revolution, which happened more than 70,000 years ago. The cognitive revolution allowed humans to maintain free will while creating common systems, such as money, that required only belief in order to be realized. When the Cognitive Revolution occurred, sapiens were able to imagine and describe things which do not exist in the real world. Ultimately, the Scientific Revolution brought forward the period when humans made the transition to a scientific and factual approach towards life. According to the book, this period started 500 years ago and it is constantly improving. These revolutions serve as proof that humans were able to form ideas that no other life form was able to do, such as politics, religion and capitalism. In contemporaneous times, ‘Sapiens’ represents the only remaining species of human. A very long time ago, 100,000 years ago to be more precise, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one – us, the Homo Sapiens. According to the book, Homo Sapiens rules the world because it is the only animal that can believe in things that exist purely in its own imagination, such as gods, states, money and human rights. Most humans assume that we were always the ones in charge. Naturally, we feel entitled to everything given our superior knowledge and intelligence when compared to animals. However, Yuval Noah Harari and his book serve as a reminder to us that long before we built the pyramids, wrote symphonies, or walked on the moon, there was nothing special about us.